This book gives readers a balanced look at the issue of welfare and its surrounding arguments. The Welfare Debate familiarizes readers with the background of the welfare system, the key players and issues within the debate, and the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Current welfare strategies, including funding and distribution, as well as future solutions, are introduced as well. Color photos and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-follow text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

This book gives readers a balanced look at the issue of welfare and its surrounding arguments. The Welfare Debate familiarizes readers with the background of the welfare system, the key players and issues within the debate, and the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Current welfare strategies, including funding and distribution, as well as future solutions, are introduced as well. Color photos and informative sidebars accompany easy-to-follow text. Features include a timeline, facts, additional resources, web sites, a glossary, a bibliography, and an index.

Visually and pedagogically rich, this wide-ranging introduction to key concepts and debates in welfare uses an innovative, question-based narrative to highlight the importance of theory to understanding welfare. In particular, it: • Introduces concepts that are core to how policy is formulated and implemented. • Provides students with a comprehensive vocabulary and toolkit for analysing policy examples and developing social science arguments. • Includes stimulus material, diagrams, critical thinking activities, further reading lists and a companion website containing further policy examples, podcasts and class activities. Written by an experienced and inspiring lecturer, this book is suitablefor undergraduate students of social policy, sociology, politics, public policy, social work, health and social care, particularly those taking courses on ‘welfare theory’,‘principles of social policy’, ‘key issues in welfare policy’ and similar.Using some of the hottest current debates about the problems and benefits of state-funded welfare, this book develops students’ social science understanding and analytic skills.

Welfare politics have now been part of American life for four centuries. Beyond a persistent general idea that Americans have a collective obligation to provide for the poorest among us, there has been little common ground on which to forge political and philosophical consensus. Are poor people poor because of their own shortcomings and moral failings, or because of systemic societal and economic obstacles? That is, does poverty have individual or structural causes? This book demonstrates why neither of these two polemical stances has been able to prevail permanently over the other and explores the public policy—and real-life—consequences of the stalemate. Author Greg M. Shaw pays special attention to the outcome of the 1996 act that was heralded as ending welfare as we know it. Historically, people on all sides of the welfare issue have hated welfare—but for different reasons. Like our forebears, we have constantly disagreed about where to strike the balance between meeting the basic needs of the very poor and creating dependency, or undermining individual initiative. The shift in 1996 from New Deal welfare entitlement to workfare mirrored the national mood and ascendant political ideology, as had welfare policy throughout American history. The special contribution of this book is to show how evolving understandings of four key issues—markets, motherhood, race, and federalism—have shaped public perceptions in this contentious debate. A rich historical narrative is here complemented by a sophisticated analytical understanding of the forces at work behind attempts to solve the welfare dilemma. How should we evaluate the current welfare-to-work model? Is a precipitous decline in state welfare caseloads sufficient evidence of success? Success, this book finds, has many measures, and ending welfare as an entitlement program has not ended arguments about how best to protect children from the ravages of poverty or how to address the plight of the most vulnerable among us.

Examines the effectiveness of the current welfare system and possible reforms.

This lucid and engaging book provides an introduction to the current debates about the future direction of welfare reform on both sides of the Atlantic. The first part outlines a range of different perspectives on welfare, and shows how each of these perspectives rests upon a different assumption about the role and purpose of welfare policy and a different understanding of human nature and motivation.

'Before the 2010 General Election, David Cameron placed the "Big Society" at the heart of his efforts to rebuild Britain's "broken society". The essays in this volume probe the historical origins of the concept and seek to evaluate it in the light of both historical and contemporary evidence. They raise profound questions about the provenance of the "Big Society" and its relevance to contemporary social concerns. They should be of interest to anyone who cares about the past, present or future of British social policy.' Bernard Harris, University of Southampton, UK'There is nothing new about the notion of a Big Society. This book combines historical scholarship, international research and grassroots experience to shine a critical spotlight on the rhetoric behind the coalition government's big idea.' Bill Jordan, University of Plymouth, UK'Armine Ishkanian and Simon Szreter's fascinating book provides important insights into the way political elites use slogans and imagery to sway public opinion on social policy issues. This highly original work will be a major scholarly resource for years to come.' James Midgley, University of California, Berkeley, USThe expert contributors to this detailed yet concise book collectively raise questions about the novelty of the Big Society Agenda, its ideological underpinnings, and challenges it poses for policymakers and practitioners.The book is divided into two sections, history and policy, which together provide readers with a historically grounded, internationally informed, and multidisciplinary analysis of the Big Society policies. The introduction and conclusion tie the strands together, providing a coherent analysis of the key issues in both sections. Various chapters in this study examine the limitations and consider the challenges involved in translating the ideas of the Big Society agenda into practice.By drawing on international examples, from developed and developing countries in order to analyse and discuss Big Society policies, this book will prove invaluable for students, academics and policymakers.

"There are places where history feels irrelevant, and America's inner cities are among them," acknowledges Michael Katz, in expressing the tensions between activism and scholarship. But this major historian of urban poverty realizes that the pain in these cities has its origins in the American past. To understand contemporary poverty, he looks particularly at an old attitude: because many nineteenth-century reformers traced extreme poverty to drink, laziness, and other forms of bad behavior, they tried to use public policy and philanthropy to improve the character of poor people, rather than to attack the structural causes of their misery. Showing how this misdiagnosis has afflicted today's welfare and educational systems, Katz draws on his own experiences to introduce each of four topics--the welfare state, the "underclass" debate, urban school reform, and the strategies of survival used by the urban poor. Uniquely informed by his personal involvement, each chapter also illustrates the interpretive power of history by focusing on a strand of social policy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: social welfare from the poorhouse era through the New Deal, ideas about urban poverty from the undeserving poor to the "underclass," and the emergence of public education through the radical school reform movement now at work in Chicago. Why have American governments proved unable to redesign a welfare system that will satisfy anyone? Why has public policy proved unable to eradicate poverty and prevent the deterioration of major cities? What strategies have helped poor people survive the poverty endemic to urban history? How did urban schools become unresponsive bureaucracies that fail to educate most of their students? Are there fresh, constructive ways to think about welfare, poverty, and public education? Throughout the book Katz shows how interpretations of the past, grounded in analytic history, can free us of comforting myths and help us to reframe discussions of these great public issues.